New advances in clinical technology can result in innovations for heart disease, cancer, renal failure, and other conditions providing substantial benefits for patients including longer life expectancy and improved quality of life. However, the adoption rate of new technologies can sometimes lag behind the introduction of advances in devices, drugs, diagnostics, therapeutic techniques, and surgical equipment. In general, patients sometimes do not access particular medical therapies from particular healthcare providers due to one or more barriers preventing or discouraging patients and providers from accessing a medical therapy from a particular healthcare provider. Although healthcare providers such as hospitals, clinics, physician's offices, outpatient treatment centers, attempt to offer the most advanced, clinical-proven methods for diagnosis and treatment, adoption is oftentimes slow or non-uniform. For example, bare-metal stents prior to 2003 were used by cardiologists seeking to perform revascularization for blockages in the heart. In April of 2003, the FDA approved the use of coated anti-proliferative but more expensive drug-eluting stents, designed to reduce re-narrowing of the artery at the location of the original stent. Adoption was rapid but uneven wherein in the year following their introduction, drug-eluting stents comprised 83% of total stents among Medicare enrollees in the top quintile of hospitals, but just 33% in the low quintile hospitals (See, Adopting Technological Innovation in Hospitals: Who Pays and Who Benefits?, American Hospital Association, October 2006). This adoption disparity suggests that one or more extant barriers to patient access can prevent patients from accessing advanced medical therapies from a particular healthcare provider and result in lowered outcomes for patients and reduced reimbursement to providers.
As such, there is clear need for systems to provide a statistically rigorous method for identifying potential barriers to patient access of a medical therapy. The need extends to providing healthcare providers with analytical tools to empirically analyze identified barriers to result in specific recommendations for reducing barriers to care. There is also a need to increase the frequency with which the healthcare provider provides the medical therapy based on statistical methods.
The need extends to a healthcare provider having a means to reduce barriers to patients accessing the medical therapy from the healthcare provider. The need includes helping identify the barriers that a healthcare provider may optimally invest time, money, and other resources into reducing the identified barriers. Because the healthcare provider may only have a finite amount of time, money, and resources to invest in reducing identified barriers, the need includes prioritizing which of the barriers to address first. Because the healthcare provider may have determined that barriers exist to patients accessing multiple different types of medical therapy from the healthcare provider, the need also includes prioritizing the medical therapies.
There is also a need for methods implementing the steps of the described systems. The methods should provide steps for obtaining a reproducible framework for analyzing barriers to medical therapy using specially adapted computer technologies. The need for such methods extends to providing outputs that can be used to inform or provide useful recommendations to healthcare provider on how to reduce barriers to patient access.
The need also includes methods and systems that provide analytical tools for estimating a market opportunity for a particular healthcare provider and using the estimates in a barrier analysis resulting in improved patient access to a medical therapy. The need further includes improving the adoption of medical therapy by allowing users to design and execute a strategy to improve adoption rates. The need also includes methods and systems for implementing statistical tools to determine a specific healthcare provider's action plan to improve adoption rates.